Page 162 of Incoronate
Three of us, if I counted Dominic. Which I always did.
I nodded, drew in a long breath and then pushed my door open to climb out of the SUV.
The rain hit me the moment my boots touched the gravel, ice-cold and merciless, and I welcomed it. It washed down my face and into my hair and through my jacket, and I let it. The demons at the front door parted to either side as we approached, lowering their heads in that same quiet, respectful gesture. Two hellhounds peeled away from the shadows and fell into step at our flanks, their massive paws silent on the wet stone.
I stopped at the foot of the steps and turned to face them.
“Walk with me to the door,” I said, my voice low but carrying through the rain, “and then hold the line. No one goes in. No one comes out. Not until I say.”
Every head in the courtyard tipped down once.
Trace fell into step on my left. Dominic on my right. We climbed the stairs together and I paused at the top, my hand on the heavy door, looking out across the army that had come to stand watch at my command.
I knew what came next.
I knew the demons couldn’t follow me inside. The wards on Temple were ancient, layered, woven with the kind of Anakim magic that pre-dated the Council itself. Hadean creatures couldn’t cross that threshold, not while the wards still held. Not even at my command. The throne could call them, place them, command them. But it could not break what the Order had spent a thousand years building.
Inside the building, it was just going to be me. And the two men I loved.
I turned to look at them one last time.
Some traitorous part of me wanted to ask them to stay out here. To wait for me on the steps where I could come back tothem in one piece. The same part of me that had tried to send Trace home a thousand times in a thousand different ways across every fight we’d ever walked into together.
I shut it up.
I’d made him a promise, and I’d meant every word of it.
Trace's blue eyes searched mine, and I knew by the way they held me without flinching that he could feel me wrestling with it through the bond. There were no words for it. None we needed.
Dominic stepped in close, his finger tipping my chin up so I had to meet his dark, taking-apart gaze. “Whatever you’re thinking, angel, the answer is no.”
“I wasn’t going to say it.”
“I know.” The corner of his mouth pulled up. “I’m proud of you.”
A laugh almost broke loose at the back of my throat. I bit it back.
“All or nothing,” he murmured, his thumb tracing once across my jaw before his hand fell away. “The way it’s always been.”
“All or nothing,” I echoed.
Trace’s hand came up to the back of my neck, and he leaned in and pressed his forehead to mine. “Whatever happens in there, we go in together. We come out together. Or we don’t come out at all.”
“Together,” echoed Dominic, his hand finding the small of my back.
I closed my eyes for one breath. Just one. Letting myself feel them on either side of me. The two halves of my heart, here, holding the line with me.
Then I opened my eyes and pushed the door open.
52. AN EYE FOR AN EYE
My eyes immediately landed on William sitting behind his desk.
He looked smaller than I remembered him. Or maybe just older in a way I couldn’t account for, the lines at his eyes deeper, his hair washed colorless somewhere between salt-and-pepper and just salt. He wore his usual cassock, the silver buttons running down the front of it, his hands folded neatly on the desk in front of him.
But his eyes were different.
They were cold. Cold in a way I had never seen them before. Cold and resigned, the way a man’s eyes go when he has already made his peace with whatever comes next.
